Editing Philippa Pearce (section)

==Early life==
Ann Philippa Pearce was the youngest of four children of a flour miller and corn merchant, Ernest Alexander Pearce, and his wife Gertrude Alice ''née'' Ramsden, who lived at the Mill House by the [[River Cam]] in the village of [[Great Shelford]], Cambridgeshire, where she was brought up.<ref>Flyleaf biography on a 1987 Puffin Books reprint of her first children's novel, ''Minnow on the Say''; ODNB entry by Nicholas Tucker [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/97555, retrieved 22 July 2013. Pay/walled.]</ref> She started school only at the age of eight because of illness, then she went on to attend the [[Perse School for Girls]] in [[Cambridge]] and win a scholarship to [[Girton College, Cambridge]] to read English and History.

After gaining her degree, Pearce moved to London, where she found work as a civil servant. Later she wrote and produced schools' radio programmes for the [[BBC]], where she remained for 13 years. She was a children's editor at the [[Oxford University Press]] from 1958 to 1960 and at the [[André Deutsch]] publishing firm from 1960 to 1967.